Wikipedia-l January 2006

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95 participants
94 discussions

comment on wikipedia
by Optim 15 Aug '24

15 Aug '24

I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works: "anyone can edit" etc. He answered with this argument: "Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person! of the man in the street!)" (average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK) I asked "why?" His explanation: "Great brilliant works are built by individuals. Groups of people can only create average works. If someone writes something good in the wiki, other average persons will intervene with his/her work and turn it into an average work. If someone writes something bad in the wiki, the others will again turn it into something of average value. with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system) you can be sure that you will never create something too bad but also never something too good. You can create only average articles." The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia will be a good resource as long as it attracts good cotnributors. but it will soon become an average site/encyclopaedia because it allows anyone to join the project and edit, and most people are just average persons and not brilliant writers. Do you think it's true? and how can we answer this argument? --Optim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] multi-headed VANDALS
by Daniel Mayer 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote: > What are the articles this person has been changing? For 66.108.155.126: 20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet 20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root 20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music 19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music For 208.24.115.6: 20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker For 141.157.232.26: 20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements. Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker. For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist and look at the contribs. --mav

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Language policy agreement in the Norwegian Wikipedia community
by Bjarte Sørensen 01 Apr '12

01 Apr '12

Dear all, Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following voting. This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so as to prevent misunderstandings in the future. Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a _third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents of the two current Norwegian versions. == A short language history of Norway == Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål. Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål, resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people. Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have Nynorsk as their first written language. More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the Norwegian Language Council: http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653 == A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian == The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created. The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed that there was no need to change and that it should continue its language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of "Norsk". Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the (mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival. == Votes == The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants Bokmål/Nynorsk only). Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk (bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)". Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no". == Summary of the problem == Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia (developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at [[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures against this activity was immediately created at [[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community. We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co- operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of [[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured articles from neighbour wikipedias. == Conclusion == Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian Wikipedia. >From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org, Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:) Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:) Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:) Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:) Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:) Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:) Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:) Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:) Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:) Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:) Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]] Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]] Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]] Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]] Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]] Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]] Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]

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RFC: Principles of mass content adding on small Wikipedias
by Milos Rancic 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

Maybe this should go on Meta, but I want to see comments here, first. As I can see, there are two ways of mass content adding. The first one includes generation of articles based on some public data (for example NASA, National Geospatial Inteligence Agency, French government etc.) Now, this is almost usual way for mass content adding and I think that a number of us have some experience with such work. The other way is adding content using English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia has a lot of categorized articles, a lot of templates etc. All these typical forms can be used for automatic content creation on small Wikipedias. I think that idea of having a thousends of articles with a couple of sentences and good categorization about a lot of fields -- can be very helpful not only to small Wikipedias, but also for spreading free knowledge. I think that it would be a great day for us when people which native language is Mongolian will be able to read about places in Amazon and movies from Australia in their native language. And, this is possible to do much faster then we think. And not only that: bots should be able to update information; bots should be able to do more things through time. Finally, it would be possible to start with knowledge transfer between Wikipedias in different languages: if we have the same methodology on different Wikipedias, we would be able to update data semi-automatic (up to full automatic). However, this needs a number of people who are interested in such project: (1) We would need people who know to work with bots (pywikipediabot or something similar). (2) We would need make software based on the bot core which would have to be localized: like MediaWiki should be localized; this software should have sentences like "<movie> is movie made in <year> in <country>. Genre of that movie is <genre>. Director was <director>..." in a number of languages. (3) We would need good and quality work on English Wikipedia. Rules like "this goes to the table, that goes to the template up, this goes to template in the middle" should be more or less strict (but, I see that people are working in such way on en:). This is RFC. I am looking for your comments.

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Fairness in voting
by Mark Williamson 04 Feb '06

04 Feb '06

Hi, The conflict at the Moldovan Wikipedia has reignited. A new user made a page called "Alegeri" (elections). It starts with him espousing his POVs. The requirements of the vote are: 1) You have to speak Romanian/Moldovan "adequately". Whether or not your skills are "adequate", is to be judged by this particular user himself. 2) You have to have at least 25 contributions on the Moldovan Wikipedia... OR the Romanian Wikipedia!!! Now, that strikes me as inherently unfair. Romanian Wikipedians are allowed to vote, sort of like a free pass? But no other Wikimedians?? It's not the ROmanian Wikipedia after all, it's the Moldovan Wikipedia! You may argue all you want about whether or not Moldovan and Romanian are a single language, whether or not that Wikipedia should exist, but to let everybody from one Wiki vote for the future of another one, but nobody from any other wikis may participate, seems inherently unfair. The same user has been very... shall we say, "headstrong". He moved dozens and dozens of pages from Cyrillic titles to Latin titles (instead of creating brand-new pages in Latin), and replaced their entire contents with direct copy from ro.wiki, systematically. He obviously didn't even review his work, because many images were broken because the image tag for ro: ([[imagine:...]]) doesn't work on mo.wiki (you have to use the default, [[image:...]]). Now, so far, of all the people who voted, the vast majority are Romanians. How is that fair? Romanians get to decide the future of the Moldovan Wikipedia, but no *other* foreigners may weigh in? Well, maybe some Romanians don't see themselves as foreigners, but in the eyes of the world, they are. And besides, very clearly, there are two separate subdomains. Whether or not Romanians are Moldovans and vice-versa, very clearly most ro.wikipedians are NOT mo.wikipedians, though a few are. Your thoughts, please? Also, I encourage everybody to vote. I explained it at the enwiki village pump--news. Mark

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Password security
by Tomasz Wegrzanowski 04 Feb '06

04 Feb '06

brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) wrote: > I've disabled the ability to use blank passwords on wiki accounts. > > For a long time we treated accounts very laxly in this regard; there generally > wasn't _that_ much reason to secure a casual account unless you were one of the > tiny number of sysops. > > In recent years though the number of sysops has exploded, and we've added > customization features like the user javascript which are cool but potentially > really annoying if someone gets into your account and messes with them. As a > small concession to security and accountability, it's time for blank passwords > to go. > > While running some password security checks, I found that a handful of sysop > accounts had blank passwords. Probably some non-sysop accounts also had blanks. > > Affected accounts can reset the password by the automated e-mail > password gadget on the login form, unless of course they didn't put in an e-mail. This is seriously wrong. It should be completely reversed. A lot of people have just lost their account because of this, and it wasn't even announced that it was coming. This part of the problem could be reduced if the change was announced in advance. However, that's not the full problem. Many people use blank or trival passwords and don't give their emails. This is completely reasonable, as it's very hard to remember just another password (and reusing passwords on different websites is about as bad as having none), and even if spamming wasn't a problem, why the heck would any website need their email in the first place ? So, while dictionary-checking sysops' passwords make a lot of sense, there's very little point in limiting passwords of the non-privileged accounts. (and yeah, /me just lost 2 (rarely used) accounts on fr.wp and de.wp)

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Re: nl problem
by Giuseppe DAngelo 04 Feb '06

04 Feb '06

It's an absolute disgrace that it should be allowed to continue. It's been clear to me for a while that the large wikipedias are as much about furthering western hegemony as anything else. NPOV generally means making western civilisation look like the absolute pinnacle, POV is when one dares challenge this hegemony. Write about vikings or celts and you can say anything you want without ever being challenged, dare suggest that something originated in the mediterranean, and all hell breaks loose. Basic premise of NPOV? Civilisation flows from north to south and west to east, don't you ever dare suggest that it has been in the reverse in the past! You think I am exaggerating - for starters try checking out the article on race and IQ, to me it looks like a gathering point for white supremists - but hey, who am I to question that? Add a graph, quote the odd looney tune scientist, and presto, you have an idiotic article that absolutely crashes through the POV barrier. It laughably suggests that as a matter of course, the average monolingual, barely literate, uncultured Homer Simpson has on average a 50% greater IQ than the average sub-saharan African - let's get real people! NPOV indeed. pippu d'angelo Message: 10 Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:59:23 +0700 From: Walter van Kalken Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Insulting the islam is allowed on nl: wikipedia To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Message-ID: <43DF895B.90409(a)vankalken.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed On nl: wikipedia we have a user (Torero) who under him quoting the rights of freedom of speech is insulting the islam and everyone who doesn't think like him on a regular basis. Today he wrote: http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overleg:DemoCrates.net&diff=30115… Allah Akbar is almost the same as Heil Hitler. This is not the first time he did this. He has insulted the islam and muslims on multiple occasions. Also he constantly accuses people of being leftwing etc. Unfortunately this is "tolerated" on nl: by the mods and anyone else who do not dare to pose an opposition against these kind of users. And everytime he apologises some time later. But what does an apology count for if he keeps on repeating himself time and time again. And again a user who happens to be muslim is going on wikibreak because of this. Freedom of speech ????? Waerth/Walter --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3

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New logo for Wikisource
by Dariusz Siedlecki 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

A new page has been created on the international Wikisource wiki for a vote and a discussion on a new logo for Wikisource. http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:New_Wikisource_logo Please leave any questions on the talk page. -- Regards, Datrio

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Where ends the responsibility of Wikipedia? (personal information of people)
by Walter Vermeir 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

I have seen a request form a person who has a entry on the English language Wikipedia to remove his date of birth because he fears identity theft. He is a USA-citizens. At first glance that seems to me a very strange reason to request to remove that information. How can you steal someones identity?? >From the day of my bright until the day that I day that I die all my movements are tracked in the national population register of Belgium. I have a electronic identity card, a electronic national medical insurance card. Most databaseses of the government functions are interconnected to exchange information about the citizens. There is not much the government does not know. (*) So how the hell can you steal some ones identify? But I understand that things are very, very different in the USA regarding that. That there no way to verify someone identify. That you can get a visa-card whit a drivers licence ID and a drivers licence with the Visa-card as identification. And that this is also the reason that Americans are not enthusiastic to give you there bank account number because there is no good protection against abuse. So when you look at it that way I would be scared also for identify theft if I where living in the USA. Would it not be reasonable to consider the local circumstances when putting information in the articles? Greetings, Walter -- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

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requisites for opening wikipedia in a language not listed
by Miguel Chaves 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Hi, I would like to know which are the pre-requisites for opening a wikipedia in a language not covered yet. I'm sure the answer must be in some place. I've been looking for this information on wikipedia itself and in the previous postings to this lists, but it's still not clear to me. Thanks and regards.

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Wikipedia-l January 2006